California cities may be swimming in homeless, hypodermic needles, human waste, and garbage, but Golden State officials really truly do care about the environment, they tell us. In fact, they care so much that some have proposed banning gasoline-powered cars — even though reputable experts say that electric autos pollute more.

Oh, such a proposal is still a radical idea in what may be our most radical state, and it won’t become reality anytime soon, it appears.

Electric cars may be a cure worse than the disease.

In fact, this is precisely the position of former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner. While he once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas and believed that creations such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence,” he some years ago had to issue a perhaps painful admission: "I was wrong.”

Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner elaborated on electric cars’ problems in a 2013 piece entitled "Unclean at Any Speed.”

Starting out simply, Zehner explained that while it’s "relatively easy to calculate the amount of energy required to charge a vehicle’s battery,” even the cleaner options for generating electricity (as opposed to oil or coal) have effects that are both real and hard to assess.

For example, "Natural gas requires burning, it produces CO2, and it often demands environmentally problematic methods to release it from the ground,” he wrote. "Nuclear power yields hard-to-store wastes as well as proliferation and fallout risks. There’s no clear-cut way to compare those impacts. Focusing only on greenhouse gases, however important, misses much of the picture.”

Hide Comments | Add Comment